In the night of 3-4 october, action group ´´The Visitors´´, sprayed painted slogans and threw paint at the homes of Harke Heida (Rijswijk), director migration policy at the Department of Security and Justice and Jos Willemsz Geeroms (The Hague), senior advisor at the Immigration and Naturalisation services (IND) and releasemanager for its IT-system INDiGO.

This is a direct protest against the inhuman asylum policy in the Netherlands.

Their Statement says:

´´Last night (3 – 4 October) we, ‘The Visitors’, spray painted slogans and threw paint at the homes of Harke Heida (Rijswijk), director migration policy at the Department of Security and Justice and Jos Willemsz Geeroms (The Hague), senior advisor at the Immigration and Naturalisation services (IND) and releasemanager for its IT-system INDiGO. We also delivered a stinking bomb at Geeroms’ home.

We make a clear stance against the racist migration policy of the Dutch state. Civil servants like Heida and Geeroms are directly co-responsible for the daily torture of thousands of people behind prison walls and for the many deportations of people who will meet a sure death in the country they are forced to go to. Heida and Geeroms will most likely claim they are only doing their job and that all these crimes are not their responsibility. But they do make themselves complicit to a colonial system of repression and exclusion. We hold them responsible for their contributions to the Dutch policies and practices of exclusion, detention and deportation of migrants. No one should make a living out of this inhumane system. No longer they can do their “jobs” in the anonymity and pretended innocence they’ve been hiding in so far.

We’ll keep on fighting for a world without borders and an end to the capitalist system that ruins the world and keeps billions of people in the grip of poverty, hunger, war, oppression and exploitation.´´ (1)

Political Will, Collective Action Needed to Address Serious Abuses

Respect for human rights is measured in deeds, not words. Ordinary people, from the homeless in Hungary, to black and Arab teenagers constantly stopped by the police in France, to Syrian asylum seekers in Greece, are paying the price for the lack of robust rights enforcement.

Judith Sunderland, senior Europe and Central Asia researcher

(Brussels) – European Union (EU) leaders in 2013 acknowledged problems of rising intolerance and persistent human rights violations across the EU, but failed to take concerted action, Human Rights Watch said today in its World Report 2014. Human Rights Watch documented EU-level developments in migration and asylum, discrimination and intolerance, and counterterrorism, highlighting events in 11 member states, including a new member, Croatia.

Deportation charter flights. They are a military operation. They are covered in the utmost secrecy. So much for a transparent democratic state! How much different are these mass deportations from the trains that left for the concentration camps during the second World War?

Ah, but they are not similar at all! The Nazi’s were crude, blatant fascists and they did not really try to hide what they were up to. Not that it made any difference.. the Dutch government sent back Jews that took refuge in the Netherlands, because Hitler was a friendly head of state they did not want to offend. This is a clear similarity to the current Dutch (and European) policy regarding refugees. After all, sending people back to unsafe countries is exactly the same practice today! But you got to hand it to them: the Dutch (or any other European) government did and does not mass murder anyone themselves, they merely cooperate, which of course is an entirely different thing. All they do is to not safeguard refugees from torture and murder, as they organize their deportation.

The article below is the text of a speech held during the demonstration to conclude the No Border Camp in Rotterdam August 2 -10. This demonstration was held on Saturday August 10 (Report with video’s here.).